


All About Ax

by For the Record (SakoAkarui)



Series: Animorphs - Tom AU [4]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 20:37:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3991951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SakoAkarui/pseuds/For%20the%20Record
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My attempt to introduce you to Ax, and what we've learned from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I should preface this with the fact that I’ve spent a few months or so trying to explain how Ax became a part of our group. Tom told you how it all started for us, but that isn’t how it started for Ax. I mean, actually it started for Ax before he’d even been born, I guess. I’ve talked with him a bit about the Andalite home world. He’s still kind of cagey about it which drives Marco insane, but I think that may be more about Ax’s inability to answer his questions. I mean, he actually is pretty good with electronics, I think. But lots of other details I feel like he didn’t really pay attention to. Plus I think he’s homesick. I’d be homesick if I was that far from home, with no idea when I’d see my people again. But in either case, I thought it was important for you to understand how Ax fits into all this. He’s a critical part of our team.

I'm Cassie, by the way. I guess you don't really know which of is writing, do you? Well, I'm Cassie, the one with the barn and bird poop. But like I've been trying to say, I don't want to talk about me here.

So here’s the thing. I’m going to cut out that ridiculous beginning section I wrote where I worry about my ability to write stories or help you understand at all what’s going on. Or all that talk about how we have to keep this war really secret. I mean, we’re being secret to survive. It actually kind of helps us for other people to know what’s going on. And I spent some 8000 words talking about what we’ve done, which is all useless. Rather than what we’ve done, I’m going to tell you who we are. Tom did an okay job at telling you about most of us. So I’ll just dedicate this to telling you about Ax.

Finding Ax was this absolutely ridiculous new age-y sounding mission of weirdness. It involved “visions”. Which was apparently just thought speech pushed over a long distance, but still. Telling you the details won’t really make much of a difference. The short story is that Ax - Aximili-Esgarouth-Isthill is his full name, though don’t trust me on the spelling - was in the dome of an Andalite dome ship. The dome was actually really cool. It was a giant park of the Andalite home world. But they detached it in battle, and it sank way out in the ocean, and we went to find him and bring him back to shore and join our fight. The rest of the Andalite ships were destroyed, according to Ax. Ax is something they call an “aristh”, like a cadet or something. He basically ranked lowest on the ship, and he was the only aristh on the ship. Because he was a kid, really. I’m pretty sure he’s similar in age to us. Or probably Tom, actually. Who knows. The way he talks about it, it sounds like he was only on that ship to Earth because his brother was. Which makes sense - why send cadets out that far, when they knew it’d be a battle, and an aristh couldn’t fight? When they knew arisths were just kids?

That’s what really kills me. Ax lost everyone on that ship, not just his brother. All the teachers who were training him, and the highest officers he respected. He’s been left with Tom as his ‘prince’, which is what they call a leading officer, I guess. We make jokes about it, but Ax was pretty serious then. Now he’s picked up some snark (I accuse Marco on this), and it’s basically the best thing ever now. The snark, not the tragic deaths. But even so, I’m really happy Ax is here with us. He’s not just here to help us fight; he’s my friend. Our friend. And he and his culture are really great and you should know more about it.


	2. Andalite Culture

So Andalites. Obviously, aliens. Maybe you’ve never been told what an Andalite looks like. I actually really like now Andalites look. There’s a delicate sleekness to them. Most people think of centaurs like horses, but that’s not it for Andalites. A horse has heft. Andalites are more like deer. Not as powerful, but much better reflexes. Their hands have far too many fingers, but they’re longish. I can tell the way Ax moves them they’re pretty sensitive. And the head is just out right bizarre. Slits for nose sort of like You-Know-Who in those movies, no mouth, extra eyes on snail-like stalks, and feathery elf ears to boot. Oh and blue fur. At least it was camouflage on their home planet, given their plants. I always kind of want to ask him more details, like what his hooves are like. Andalites eat by absorbing nutrients through their hooves as they run. I know his hooves are cloven, but beyond that I haven’t felt comfortable enough to ask. Like it might be really personal. Who knows? He doesn’t understand why humans wear clothes.

Ax says the Andalite home world is pretty different from Earth. For starters, they orbit a binary star. It actually sounds kind of cool. He says the sky is red-gold, and that they have a large number of thin clouds, but they only form long enough to gently rain again. They have some larger bodies of water, but the Andalites don’t live near them, and they aren’t anything like our oceans. More of the water is in rivers and lakes. We got to see a little in the dome ship when we rescued Ax. The grass was bluer than ours, and the trees were kind of weird. One looked like a giant red-purple asparagus. But he had far more words for how the water and grass and trees interacted then individual names. It’s this weird holistic view, like the fir tree can’t just be a fir tree. It’s one thing if it’s alone, and another if there are a bunch, or if it’s next to a lake. Its name keeps changing. Very alien kind of thing, and it just didn’t translate well. And the suns and moons and clouds also related to these things. On top of two stars, they have four moons.

Ax says he comes from a part of the world that is heavily wooded, just rolling hills and a good amount of rain. He says it’s one of the best places to live, because all sorts of grasses grow there. But it’s apparently very far from the capital, and the closest port is two days journey from his home. There are only three space ports over the entire planet, and one of them is in a cold part of the planet, where the local grass can hardly sustain even a small population of Andalites. Apparently that’s the one he left his planet from. He hasn’t returned since that first take-off.

I said before that a lot of this is stuff he’s only been talking about recently. He doesn’t want the information to reach the Yeerks, in case they can use it against his home world. He actually told me a bit more about the kinds of occupations Andalites have, and which areas are the most populated and why. I don’t think I can tell you that, unfortunately. But he did tell me about Andalite music, and I can’t imagine how that would help the Yeerks.

Ax has said on numerous occasions how he hates all Earth music. And he really means all of it. So I asked him about Andalite music, and he said the only Andalite music that mattered is called aribathsit. I’m pretty sure it’s a genre of music, but Ax won’t describe other genres except to say that they are awful and Andalites who listen to them don’t have any sense of hearing. It’s one of the few things Ax is willing to argue about. Normally he just dismisses things like it’s not his business to talk about it. Aribathsit is played only in certain locations, because it incorporates the sounds and aspects of the land around it. Just about every song uses this instrument that is placed into a waterfall. The player than changes how far the water falls and different angles, which changes the pitches or rhythms or whatever. They have an instrument that also plays the wind, which requires a lot of improvisation. Basically entirely improvisation. Which I think is really really cool. I mean, they are literally playing nature. I really want to hear it, but Ax doesn’t know how to make any of the instruments. He assures me that it is the best music in the universe, however.


	3. Teaching Ax about Humans

So, okay, that’s all well and good. But we learned a lot by trying to teach Ax about us.

We weren’t really sure what to do with Ax at first. We brought Ax up to my barn to live in the forest, of course. Our farm is in the middle of the forest that eventually becomes national park territory if you hike far enough. So it was really convenient. The area was just enough out of the way we didn’t think Yeerks would come looking, but close to me and Tobias’s meadow. He and Tobias were talking every day then. I had a feeling Tobias had been really lonely before that, and they’re really close now. It was kind of a blessing to have Ax out there. And I came out to see them a few times.

Ax was completely a tightwad at first. That sounds harsh; like I said, he was in way over his head. But it was crazy how he just cut off every conversation. He wouldn’t talk about the Andalite home world at all. Even when I asked questions about the stuff in the dome, he cut me off. He was just very stiff and formal, which I guess is from his time in the Andalite military. So we didn’t learn much about the war or Andalites then. We thought maybe if he learned about us he’d feel better about telling us about himself. So we tried to teach him about humans.

Ax could make a morph from all of us, creating this unique human morph. Very odd to look at, because you see your own hair or Rachel’s eyes and it just gets weird. I try not to think about it too much. We had him morph human and then go do something typically human. We decided to start with basic consumerism and took him to the mall. Rachel pulled him into some clothing store and schooled him on fashion. This was a twenty minute seminar and I don’t think Rachel breathed for the entirety of the lesson. Except he had a lot of problems understanding why boys and girls wore different styles of clothes. Rachel let him pick out things to try on and he came back with a skirt. I swear, it was this really girly skirt with flowers and leaves on it. His morph does make a pretty boy, though, so maybe it would’ve worked. Regardless I nearly lost it while Rachel took matters into her own hands. She liked it better that way, anyhow. She got him three new outfits and then spent our lunch time in the food court marking the tags, “so he won’t wear the wrong ones together”.

Typical Rachel. She likes to take charge. And now all those outfits sit in a duffle in my barn.

We got burgers for lunch, because that was considered typically American. We tried to explain to him what America was, but he didn’t really comprehend different countries. We tried to explain it like this. So, different species come from different worlds, so we had different names for them. In that way, human lands are divided by countries, and each country has its own name, and the people from those areas each have their own nationality. Like we were in America, and we were born here on this land, so we’re Americans. But people in Mexico, south of us, were Mexicans, because that land is Mexico. I don’t think any of it really settled in until he found a history book and then he just wanted to know why humans would ever have wars with other humans, because he still didn’t understand this country thing. Which is an argument we still haven’t settled.

So Ax is baffled by the history of us, particularly our wars, and hates our music, but he loves human food. I mean, really loves. And I use the word food very loosely. We took him to the movies and he tried to eat stale popcorn off the floor. And… cigarette butts. He also ate both mine and Rachel’s burgers by prying them from our fingers. We were drawing a lot of attention, especially because Ax doesn’t know how far his voice carries. He always speaks really loudly. Like REALLY loudly. And then, he was just yelling, and repeating himself, but also just saying the same sounds over and over. Especially ‘b’ sounds. We’ve told him to stop but he doesn’t seem to be in control of that at all.

On a safer note (unlike trips to the mall where Ax wanders off like a five year old, no matter how many times we tell him not to) after a month or so, we got a computer set up for Ax to use. He jerry-rigged it to run off of solar panels, then set up an internet connection that I’m sure is illegal. Like I said, he actually seems pretty good at the tech stuff. I complimented him on it once but he didn’t seemed pleased about it. But he definitely knows his stuff. So now whenever we have meetings he talks about the newest thing he learned on the internet. And he expects us to be able to explain it, because we’re humans and the internet is human, but the internet is way too weird. I don’t even know what led Ax to some of the things he’s asked us about. Luckily, Tom tries to handle the really weird ones. Not a job I envy. And he looks like a soldier walking into certain death every time it happens.


	4. Chapter 4

So as I mentioned, Ax doesn’t want to tell us really anything about the bigger war. But… I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t know that much either. When I’ve gotten him to talk about his time as an aristh, he mentions things like running headlong into a ship’s captain, or failing various tests on necessary skill assessments. But he will tell us about the Yeerks. He told us what they’ve done to other planets they’ve conquered. He made it very clear that this is a battle for all of Earth. The Yeerks are beyond relentless. Yes, they enslave the minds of hosts. And that should be enough. But the way they complete raze culture and the environment… Ax describes them as a horrific plague running wild in the universe. They come into a planet, that’s never faced them, and like a disease tear everything apart. They’re the smallpox blanket of this war. He mentions again and again: Yeerks are murderers of life. All life. That’s what we’re up against. So please take a minute to think on what we’re saying and be cautious. 

So now it’s the six of us. All of us way too young to be in it, but by now we don’t have the energy to keep arguing that. Or maybe we do because we keeping harping on it. I know I’d be really happy to leave the fighting to someone else, especially adults trained for this type of thing. But at least I'm fighting with good people. And we're going to do our best.


End file.
